What I Was by Meg Rosoff

What I Was is Meg Rosoff's first adult novel, but like her novels for teens, it is a coming of age story. A 16 year-old boy, nameless to the reader, is sent to St. Oswald's in 1962 after getting kicked out of another boarding school.  St. Oswald's is on the coast of East Anglia - a setting shared with Elly Griffiths' mysteries - with its salt marshes, Roman fort and a medieval lost town.  To escape from the brutishness of his school, he visits his idol, Finn, another teenaged boy who lives alone in a cottage that is cut off from the mainland at high tide.  Of course it turns out that living off the grid when you are only a teenager is not quite a safe thing to do, and tragedy strikes.  At just over 200 pages, this small book is a quick and enjoyable read, although not a favorite of mine like Meg Rosoff's Printz-winning novel How I Live Now.

This year's Garden State Teen Book Award 2009 winners:

Fiction Grades 6-8, Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Fiction Grades 9-12, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Nonfiction Grades 6-12, Freedom Riders: John Lewis and Jim Zwerg on the Front Lines of the Civil Rights Movement by Ann Bausum

For past awards in these categories, visit the NJLA website.

New Jersey Hall of Fame Adds Thirteen

The New Jersey Hall of Fame announced its sophomore class list, adding thirteen to the roster of famous Jerseyans (Jerseyites?) Inductees include Carl Sagan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Althea Gibson, Jon Bon Jovi, Paul Robeson and Shaquille O'Neal.

Speaking of famous people, Columbia Middle School students have been asking for biographies of famous scientists or women or both lately for the annual, dreaded, read a biography-which-is-longer-than-200-pages assignment. Dreaded because biographies tend to come in two distinct formats: those shelved in the Children's Department tend to have fewer than 100 pages. Those residing upstairs in the library could double as doorstops and no kid wants to read them. Parents soon realize that there is a third and most desirable kind of biography, those which

1. interest your child

2. have just about 200 pages and no more

3. are approved by the teacher

4. are owned by the library

5. and finally, are checked out - because those are the books all 200 kids want to read and the early birds, or rather, early middle schoolers, have already checked them out while your child's assignment was still crumpled up in the linty recesses of his backpack.

All is not lost though, ask your friendly librarian and we'll see if we can dig up something your middle schooler will like and will actually be able to read before the next assignment comes along. Meanwhile, librarians will be combing the reviews for 200 page biographies of people who would really interest a middle schooler and when we find it, we'll order a few dozen.

Caldecott and Newbery Awards Announced at ALA today

The American Library Association's Midwinter meeting concludes today in Philadelphia with the announcement of this years children's and young adult literature awards.The Newbery Award for writing of children's books, The Caldecott for illustration of children's books and several other awards are listed in this press release:

' “Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village,” written by Laura Amy Schlitz, is the 2008 Newbery Medal winner. “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” illustrated by Brian Selznick, is the 2008 Caldecott Medal winner. The book is published by Scholastic.'

Take a look at this AP article for a summary of the award books:

'NEW YORK - A Baltimore librarian’s classroom project is now part of publishing history. "Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices From a Medieval Village," first conceived a decade ago by Laura Amy Schlitz, is this year’s winner of the John Newbery Medal for best children’s book.The Randolph Caldecott award for top picture book went to Brian Selznick’s "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," a 500-plus page hybrid of a graphic novel and traditional illustration about an orphan boy and a robot in Paris at the turn of the 20th century.Also today, science fiction author Orson Scott Card won the Margaret A. Edwards Award for "lifetime achievement in writing for young adults." Mo Willems’ "There Is a Bird in Your Head!" received the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for "the most distinguished book for beginning readers." '

Booker Literary Prize Goes to Irish Author

The Associated Press reports, "Irish writer Anne Enright won the Man Booker fiction prize Tuesday for The Gathering, an uncompromising portrait of a troubled family."
The book is described as "a family epic set in England and Ireland, in which a brother's suicide prompts 39-year-old Veronica Hegarty to probe her family's troubled, tangled history."
Click here for the website of the Man Booker Prize, which is awarded yearly to authors from the U.K. and Commonwealth nations.
Readers who liked the following memoirs: The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, the Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, and the Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer might like Enright's the Gathering.

Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

"They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off," author Doris Lessing, age 87, said in reaction to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Read the full BBC News report for more bon mots from the feisty author.
The article continues:"she made her breakthrough with The Golden Notebook in 1962. 'The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th Century view of the male-female relationship,' the Swedish Academy said. But Lessing herself has distanced herself from the feminist movement.The content of her other novels ranges from semi-autobiographical African experiences to social and political struggle, psychological thrillers and science fiction."

The Quill Awards for Popular Books

The third year of the Quill Awards will be broadcast on October 22, 2007. The awards were created in 2005 to be a kind of Emmy or Oscar award for books. Anyone can vote online. The list of this year's nominated books can be found by clicking here. To vote for your favorite book of 2006, click here.
General Fiction Nominees are:

American Youth by Phil LaMarche
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe
Brothers by Da Chen

Garden State Book Awards announced

The Children’s Services Section of the New Jersey Library Association announces the following recipients of the 2007 Garden State Children’s Book Award:

EASY-TO-READ BOOK: LOOSE TOOTH by Lola M. Schaefer, pictures by Sylvie Wickstrom

EASY-TO-READ SERIES BOOK: SECOND GRADE RULES, AMBER BROWN by Paula Danziger, illustrated by Tony Ross

FICTION, GRADES 2 - 5: THE LAST HOLIDAY CONCERT by Andrew Clements, cover art by Brian Selznick

NON-FICTION, GRADES 2 - 5: ACTUAL SIZE by Steve Jenkins

The Garden State Teen Book Awards have also been announced and are are posted on the NJLA website.

Book Awards Announced at ALA Midwinter Meeting

The American Library Association announced the winners of various book prizes, including the well-know Caldecott and Newbery Awards at their Mid-Winter meeting in San Antonio yesterday. See this Publisher's Weekly piece for details and this piece from the One-Minute Book Reviews Blog in which reviewer/blogger Janice Harayda points out that Flotsam by David Wiesner, which won the Caldecott Award for best illustrated children's book, has New Jersey connections. Wiesner clearly recalls his youthful vacations "down the shore" at Long Beach Island in this wordless picture book.
This led me to thinking yet again about why there is no central place(that I can find) which keeps track of New Jersey authors and literary connections. Some authors are listed at the New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame. A glossy flyer for the newly reestablished New Jersey Center for the Book got my hopes up, but, noble a cause as it may be, the website does not yet seem to make any mention of New Jersey authors as a group. I thought maybe Rutgers libraries or Rutgers Press might pull all that information together as they have done so beautifully for North Carolina authors on the UNC Chapel Hill library website (part of the North Carolina Collection at the Wilson Library.)
If you put the search terms "New Jersey authors" into the google search box at the top of this blog, the posts on this subject will pop up.

Newbery and Caldecott Awards of Best Children's Books

The 2006 winners of the Newbery and Caldecott Awards for childrens books were announced at the American Library Association's midwinter conference in San Antonio this week. Take a look at this page on the ALA website to see a description of the Newbery Winner for the best written childrens book of the year: Criss Cross by Lynn Rae Perkins. Here is a link to the Caldecott winner for best illustrated childrens book of the year, The Hello, Goodbye Window, illustrated by Chris Raschka. The ALA site also has lists of the Newbery and Caldecott Honor Books (runners-up that is) and all the award books since 1922 for the Newberys and Caldecott winners since 1938. There are many literary awards given out every year for childrens and young adult (teen) books and they are listed on the ALA website, so next time you are looking for the perfect gift for the children in your life, take a look at the awards lists.